California Democrats advance anti-ICE bills, but friction emerges
Both the California Assembly and their counterparts down the hall in the Senate voted in favor of bills to push back against President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda, and the federal agents who enforce it, ahead of a Friday deadline for such measures to cross over to the other chamber.
The Assembly advanced 22 immigration enforcement-related bills on Wednesday. The Senate advanced 10. Among the measures were bills to prosecute people who impersonate immigration agents, require U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to put its agency name on rental cars it uses in operations, require hotels to notify guests and employees when ICE is staying there and block ICE from staging out of state-owned facilities.
More bills required the California attorney general to investigate fatal shootings by ICE officers (a reduced version of a bill that initially required an investigation in all such shootings), keep California cops from moonlighting with ICE, heavily tax private prison companies running ICE detention and more.
The Assembly bills drew significant support in that chamber, but there are signs of trouble ahead for some legislation as it moves to the Senate. Democrat support may not be quite as unified now as it appeared in January and February, when lawmakers flooded the state Capitol with legislation seeking to blunt the work of federal immigration agents after they shot and killed two protesting U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.
Since February, however, concerns about some of the measures have percolated up, much of it from influential law enforcement lobbying organizations who worry about effects on their own hiring and operations, and business groups worried about efforts to restrict federal contracts.
Many measures meet little resistance
Some of those proposals were bold experiments in California flexing its muscles against the federal government, but drew widespread enthusiasm nonetheless. Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, D-Hollister, put his weight behind Assembly Bill 1896, which would ban any U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents who conducted immigration enforcement during the second Trump administration from public employment in California. The bill carries constitutional concerns, both for clashing with federal authority and potentially discriminating against a narrow class of law enforcement officers.
Republicans criticized Democrats for pushing what they called politically performative measures that are unlikely to hold up in court.
“They’re just going through,” Assemblymember James Gallagher, R-Yuba City, told The Sacramento Bee. “There’s no changes, no vetting, there’s no ‘oh, hey, that’s a good point.’”
Lawmakers seek to paint immigration enforcement officers with too broad a brush, the Republican said, after facing a backlash from voters during the 2024 election.
“Overwhelmingly we have people doing their job, that they’re supposed to do, it’s their duty to do it, enforcing federal immigration law,” Gallagher said.
Some bills have seen amendments, but the majority met little resistance in their first chambers.
California policymakers have not hesitated to test their ability to regulate the federal government during Trump’s presidencies. A bill lawmakers passed last year to prohibit federal agents from wearing masks during operations has run into legal issues and remains blocked by courts. Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, brought a bill this year to ban mask-wearing by state law enforcement as well, responding to judges’ concerns that last year’s measure discriminates against federal agents.
Senators passed Wiener’s new bill last week and it awaits action in the Assembly.
Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez, the Los Angeles Democrat who co-authored AB 1896 with Rivas, said on Wednesday that the speaker’s sponsorship “sends a message that California will not bend when it comes to defending our communities, our civil rights and the values that define our Golden State.” The Assembly ultimately voted 53-21 to pass the measure on to the Senate. Six Democrats did not vote on the measure and one, Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains, D-Delano, voted against the measure.
Bains, a moderate Democrat, is running for Congress in a Central Valley district.
California Senate shows some skepticism
But down the hall, a similar measure was getting reworked by senators who said it didn’t have the caucus support to advance without major changes.
Senate Bill 938, was intended to disqualify people from being a police officer in the state for 10 years if they were involved in immigration enforcement for a federal agency since Trump returned to office. But state Sen. Caroline Menjivar, D-Panorama City, gutted the bill due to internal pushback among senators. Their concerns included that it would make it harder for California law enforcement agencies to hire new people. Instead, Menjivar changed the bill to prevent current ICE officers from receiving a state training waiver when applying for a job for local law enforcement agencies.
Former agents could still become California sheriff’s deputies and cops — after going through the state’s law enforcement training.
“Ideally, I would never want them to be local law enforcement officers,” Menjivar said. “But I’m just one of 120 legislators. So anything that moves it towards the goalpost, I think is a win.”
Menjivar assumed that the signature anti-ICE bill introduced by Gonzalez and Rivas would also face a tough path in the Senate “if my own colleagues did this to my bill,” she said. The Assembly bill would go further than Menjivar’s original plan, by banning former federal immigration agents from any state employment, not just in law enforcement.
Senate Democrats expressed concern that the Legislature was going too far.
“I feel like we are diving in way too much in areas that really pertain to federal government,” said state Sen. Melissa Hurtado, D-Bakersfield. Hurtado’s parents are immigrants, she said, and “what we should be pushing for, and I’ve long said this, is immigration reform.”
In another example, a bill aiming to place limits on when federal authorities can make arrests, and agreements they can have with California law enforcement agencies, barely made it out of the Senate after several Democrats voted against it or declined to vote on it at all.
Gonzalez told The Sacramento Bee AB 1896 still has a path through the Senate. Bill proponents have been working with law enforcement organizations to try and address their concerns, he said.
Senate President pro Tem Monique Limón, D-Santa Barbara, declined to comment through a spokesperson.
The bill’s backers are considering more guidelines to make sure the bill only specifically bans those agents who participated in the ongoing immigration crackdown, Gonzalez said. To do that, he said that would include adding criteria on if they accepted the big signing bonuses the U.S. Department of Homeland Security offered new hires as they ramped up their deportation efforts.
Its sponsors already amended the bill to ensure it would apply only to agents themselves, and not federal employees such as custodians or others whose work was distant from the widespread injustices Democrats perceive in DHS’s enforcement operations on the street.
Though ICE’s actions have not recently shaken the nation the way it did at the start of the year, the deportation drive continues, and so does the momentum in the Legislature to act, Gonzalez said.
“We don’t know what this administration is going to do,” he said. “It treats California like it’s a political playground, and the goal here is to put every thing we’ve got on the table, every tool on the table, and push back and say we’re not going to do this here.”
This story was originally published May 28, 2026 at 12:41 PM.
